james_nicoll

I'd hazard a guess that the first peak in the graph is from atmospheric testing of fusion weapons, and the second is from scientific, medical and commercial use of helium-3. I'm not sure why it would fall from 1988 to 1996, though.

uhmm, a changover in the formulat of Cat Food?

Language Log discussed a certain behavior of the Google Ngram Viewer (which I assume is the source for this graph) a couple of years back. The entry is here.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2848

Before reading it, you might want to try doing a Ngram search for "funk", preferably from at least 1600 onwards. Can you guess what is going on with the results? (The article explains it.)

Mentions of Helium-3 in your blog posts as a percentage of total word written?

James musta written a lotta blog posts back in 1968.

Estimates of He3 in the moon's crust?

Well, I recognise it as a Google graph of the frequency of the phrase over time. I don't know much about that particular Google feature and have no idea what sort of corpus you're running it over - science fiction? all fiction? all books? all available printed and electronic text?

Probably not that last option, come to think of it, because the shape of the graph suggests that the absolute numbers involved are pretty small; I'd guess that the horizontal lines represent only about 5-10 in absolute numbers. So don't read too much into small random variations. I suspect that the graph from about 1973 to the present is statistically indistinguishable from a horizontal straight line at any reasonable significance level; ditto 1956-70.

As for the big drop in the 1970s, my guess would be that it reflects the general disillusionment about fusion power that started around that time.

Your influence has fallen greatly, but is recovering?

Let's get a little more inclusive:


Setting the smoothing to zero:


Diving into the spike from 1959-1961, I suggest the surge may be due to some combination of cryogenic effects, the emergence of isotopic-abundance techniques, rising interest in nuclear fusion, and generally living in the Atomic Age.

The effects of Santarius, et al can clearly be seen circa 1990, although the general level is also propped up by interest in Big-Bang nucleosynthesis.

If you do "He3" you get a major spike in the 60s, a steady drop off towards the 80s, followed by a sudden smaller square blip for most of the 80s that then drops off before the 90s and a drop back down to 1940s era levels of use.

He3 also returns 3.2e-5 results vs. those 3.7e-6 results.

there's also an odd blip (larger than the maximum peaks of "Helium three" and "helium 3") in the 1850s that I can't explain.

The spike around 1960 was probably due to the increasing availability of 3He, as tritium stockpiles for the weapons programs had been built up.

I assumed it was number of references to the possibility of helium 3 in the lunar crust.

Tralphium has been discovered!

Your url is missing the terminal l.

I'm not as skillful with the mouse as I used to be. Watch me decline as I age, live on the Internet.

(ahem)

Tralphium has been discovered!

You REALLY need to see a cardiologist.